


The Ache for Home

by halcyon_autumn



Category: Daredevil (TV), Jessica Jones (TV), MCU, Marvel
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Karen my precious warrior woman, Luke Cage - Freeform, Matt Murdock is a hero but probably needs therapy, One-Shots, PTSD, Poor Luke loves his crappy bar so much, The non-con is in reference to the thing that kicks off Matt's vigilante activities, but feel free to read romantic relationships in if you want to, everything is pretty platonic, its not detailed at all, just as vague as the show, probably more characters and relationships to come
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-15
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-23 01:29:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3749899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halcyon_autumn/pseuds/halcyon_autumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The inhabitants of Hell's Kitchen have homes they've found and homes they've built, edifices of brick and mortar or blood pumping through the person beside them. Sometimes a home is both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Nelson & Murdock

‘Home’ was an odd concept for Karen Page. Even before Daniel Fisher bled out in her apartment, the place didn’t feel like home. Her inability to clean the blood out of her carpet didn’t help. When she finally went home, the coppery scene of blood made her gag when walked in. She ate breakfast staring at the hole in her wall, the walked back into her room. When she went to work that morning, she had a pair of extra clothes and a toothbrush shoved into her purse. Nelson & Murdock wasn’t the most calming place to sleep, but it was better than her apartment. Some nights she curled up underneath Matt’s desk, a quilt wrapped around thin frame, and curled her hands into fist until she could breathe again. Other times she spread out beside her own desk, listening to cars driving past and the soft mumble of voices outside. There are people out there, she told herself. You’re not alone here. If you scream, someone will hear. Usually the city was a threat, a terror, but occasionally it was a lullaby. Empirical evidence of other humans was far more soothing than any music. 

On the worst nights Karen piled blankets on top of herself until she recaptured the safety of childhood, the certainty that the monster can’t get you if you’re safe in your bed. The blankets were always folded and shoved in the back of the least-filthy closet before Foggy or Matt came in. She was never sure whether or not they realized she was essentially living at the office.

At first it was small things; a hairbrush in her desk, a few frozen meals in the tiny fridge in the break room. Foggy asked about a bottle of facewash in their crappy bathroom and she lied, telling him that she’d brought it for emergencies. She hid the tampons better. The office wasn’t home, but it was the place where a surprising amount of her stuff was.

Foggy noticed her late nights and took her out. Karen drank until her fears were distant and hazy, until the city was a blur of bright lights against the dark sky rather than shadows that she could drown in. It didn’t fix anything; she still avoided her apartment and stayed there as little as possible. But it was something bright to hold onto when she suddenly felt the coolness of the knife in her hand, when she heard the voices of police officers screaming at her to get on the ground.

The investigation into Union Allied grew more intense, and the three started pulling late nights (well, Foggy and Matt started pulling later nights). Slowly, the smell of crappy Chinese food permeated the back room. Karen grew accustomed to the clack of keyboards, Matt’s quiet chuckle – Foggy was better at making Matt laugh than she was – and the tap of rain against the wide windows behind her desk. One night, after sifting through folder after folder of financial records and eating too much Orange Chicken, she realized Foggy and Matt had fallen asleep. She dragged her blankets out of the closet and draped them around the two men before going to sleep herself.

Home was the backroom, with Matt’s intensity driving them forward, buoyed by Foggy’s determination. It was the sound of muffled rap music coming from the street when cars drove past, the smell of cheap coffee and quick bear of Foggy tapping a pen against the table. Even after Fisk went down and Karen forced herself to start sleeping in her own apartment, she left blankets tucked into the (now scrubbed clean) closet. And when she arrived at the office so find Foggy wrapped in her old quilt with a cold pot of coffee in front of him, she smiled and went to make a new pot of coffee. Home was never her apartment, even after she changed the carpet and fixed the wall and only had nightmares twice a month. It was a dinky office in Hell’s Kitchen with a sheet of paper tapped to the door.


	2. Hell's Kitchen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The guide books don't have much to say about Hell's Kitchen, though police dispatch certainly does.

Matt wondered, sometimes, what Hell’s Kitchen seemed like to other people. He remembered, dimly, the city of his childhood. It hadn’t been much to look at. His memories were full of rundown buildings and streets punctuated with cigarette butts and broken glass. But the smell of cigarette smoke would always remind him of the little hole in the wall burger place where his father took him on his birthday every year. The frequent whine of police sirens and drunken yelling had been better lullabies than the ones his mother had skipped out on singing to him. The assurance that the city continued on as before, unchanging, was more comforting than the words of a mother who clearly hadn’t cared.

The city had turned against him between his father’s death and Stick finding him. The sound of passing cars nearly overwhelmed him. Walking down the street nearly made him throw up; the smell of the McDonalds down the street gagged him and catching a whiff of a woman’s perfume felt like having a spike driven into his sinuses. Sirens had stopped being lullabies and become splitting migraines. He’d laid on his bed in the orphanage, wanting to scream but terrified that his own voice would send him over the edge. Stick had trained him to be a soldier, had abandoned him at the first sight of attachment, but Matt couldn’t deny that the old man had saved him from losing his sanity at the sensory overload.

Didn’t mean that Stick wasn’t a dick, though.

Once the city wasn’t nearly killing him, it had been a source of wonderment. Matt could hear fifty different languages – Spanish, English, Serbian, Russian, German, and once what he thought was Swahili – on the streets, threaded with birdsong and pop music blaring from car radios. Stick had left him, abandoned him just like Matt’s own mother (like his father, Matt thought on the bad days when he wore anger to keep from choking on his grief). But the city was a constant, a routine, a pattern that repeated – the aroma of bakeries early in the morning, the overwhelming smells of exhaust during rush hour, the loud laughter and occasionally drunken singing on Friday nights. He could leave the city but the city couldn’t ever leave him. 

But then he couldn't leave the city after all. The sirens had stopped being comforting years ago, but now they came with yelling or crying or sobs so soft that he could barely hear them. Those sounds came with crime statistics attached ("Matt, why are you trying to memorize the crime rates in Hell's Kitchen?" "Well, Foggy, uh, random curiosity."). Matt knew about how many crimes went unreported (the one by the little Italian place where they always over-salt the bread, the one where the guy was walking home from the bar with the out of tune piano) and he nearly walked into confession to tell the Priest that horrible things were happening and he wasn't stopping. The day after Matt beat a man half to death, he walked into his internship the next day with a tight, satisfied smile. When he and Foggy were offered a job, Matt turned it down immediately. He was needed at home.

Matt didn’t start out as the Defender of Hell’s Kitchen, a man defending his home. He started out as a man in a hoodie, beating a child molester who deserved it. A younger Matt Murdock might have thought of himself as an instrument of God’s wrath; Matt as he was now knew he was a single man declaring an impossible war, but one that he would fight anyway. In a tiny corner of his mind, buried under righteous anger and helpless rage, he was a little relieved when Fisk showed up. There were hundreds of people that he couldn’t help every day, and that wore on him. But taking down Fisk meant that there were thousands of people that he had helped, and that was a realization he could hold on to. Someone had challenged the very brick and mortar of his city, a slap in the face – or a gunshot to the head – of the belief that his home, at least, couldn’t be taken away from him.

Matthew Murdock knew that he’d saved lives, that he’d done something good, that whatever laws he had broken in taking down Fisk were swallowed up in saving the people of Hell’s Kitchen. But underneath that was the vicious satisfaction of his twelve year old self that he’d finally been able to hold on to something. His home, at least, couldn’t be taken away from him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope it's clear that Matt absolutely loves and looks up to his father and thinks positively of him. I just think that after progressive emotional shocks, Matt might be mad that parental figures keep leaving him, even if his father's death wasn't intentional, and blame anyone he could to cope. I always figured Matt would recognize this eventually (I hope someone got that poor kid some therapy at some point).
> 
> I sort of headcanon that Matt's vigilante activities started in college but he didn't get quite so...extracurricular with it until after he passed the LSAT. 
> 
> I'm thinking of doing Ben Urich or Foggy next. I'm tempted to try writing some of the villains as well (Vanessa, for example, would be really fun, and maybe the Russian who keep trying to build kingdoms and having them ripped away). Anyone got any preferences for characters you'd like to see next?


	3. Luke's

“This place looks…nice,” said the young woman. “Do you come here often?”

“All the time,” her date answered. Luke recognized Andrew, a regular Friday customer who favored Jack and Coke and always tipped. The girl he didn’t know. “It’s a good place.”

“It’s a dive bar,” the woman whispered. Luke’s fingers tightened on the glass he was cleaning. She was right, but it was a _great_  dive bar. Excellent service. Very clean.

Andrew shook his head. “No no. See that there is Ramona Cruz. She tells the best stories about backpacking around Central America.”

Luke grinned. Ramona told the best  _lies_ about backpacking around Central America (or France, or Thailand, or Mongolia) but customers ate them up. Andrew knew quite well she was lying, but he seemed to realize that his date was in need of salvaging.

 “That server over there is Connor. He can only make decent drinks involving tequila. Everything else he makes is awful. I asked for water once, and he messed it up.”

That was true, unfortunately. If it involved mixing drinks, Connor was sure to botch it. He had also legitimately given Andrew a glass full of vodka rather than water, though Luke suspected that was more out of some personal dislike than actual stupidity. Luke would have fired him except that Andrew shared Luke’s dedication to keeping the place clean and never rolled his eyes when Luke told him to wipe the counter for the umpteenth time. And, good guy or not, watching Andrew cough on the vodka had been pretty funny.

The girl was starting to soften, the tension draining from her shoulders as she leaned in closer to Andrew. “Who’s that?”

“That’s the owner, Luke. Makes the best Long Island Ice Teas and once broke up a fight simply by raising his eyebrows.”

 He’d actually had to raise an eyebrow and start walking towards them before the drunks scrambled out, but he wasn’t about to point that out. Hiding his smile, Luke reached for another glass to start cleaning.

 The girl looked completely at ease now. “Well, if you’re sure, I think we’d better have a drink,” she said. “This place better live up to everything you’ve said.”

 Luke finally spoke. “It will.” He watched with concealed delight as both Andrew and his date realized he’d heard everything they said. Letting them sweat was tempting, but Luke took pity on them. “Are you two gonna order or keep saying nice things about my bar?”

 It was the gift that kept on giving, this run-down bar in Hell Kitchen’s with mismatched chairs and a spotless countertop. It was a way to earn a living for an escaped convict who couldn’t convince anyone of his innocence. It was a reminder of his wife, with her slow smile in the mornings and her off-key singing while she balanced books in the back. It was _his_ , somewhere he could sink into and wrap his life around that wouldn’t die in a bus crash.

 In two months, Luke Cage would set his own bar on fire. He would think of many things – “ _will whiskey or tequila burn better_?” and “ _NO NO NO_ ” and “ _Have to wait for Jessica. She has to see.”_ He would remember, right before he dropped the lighter, of his high school English teacher, and the “cheat-sheet to symbolism” handout she’d given them before trying to force them to read Hemingway. Fire was cleansing, destruction, and rebirth. He clung to that as he threw the lighter.

 What bullshit.

 Later, there would be a new home: a sarcastic voice, the too-frequent smell of whiskey, the word “shit” a staple of her vocabulary. Not yet. Now he was on his knees in the street, wreathed in flame. He wasn’t reborn, wasn’t cleansed. But he wasn’t destroyed either. That was something, at least, he decided as Jessica Jones beat out the fire around him. Not a lot, mind you. But something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot that Luke names the bar after himself, bless him.
> 
> I've expanded this to Jessica Jones characters, since I'm pretty sure they're all running around Hell's Kitchen too and, well, I really wanted to write this for Luke.

**Author's Note:**

> So this is my series about what "home" means to characters in Netflix Daredevil. I'm planning to do Ben Urich and Matt Murdock, and maybe Foggy Nelson and Claire Temple, I haven't decided. I'm really trying to focus on prose, and giving useful description that doesn't go overboard, and character development. Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated.
> 
> If you're thinking 'why is she writing daredevil fic instead of that buckynat thing she promised to do' I'm working on it I swear I'm sorry.
> 
> The Title is taken from a Maya Angelou quote because I'm genuinely awful at titles and like to take when from people way smarter than me.


End file.
